Tradition & history
The Hermetic Principles
Seven short ideas about how everything connects have travelled from a 1908 book into countless wellness and self-development circles. Here is what they say, and their real history, which is younger and more interesting than the legend.
Where they come from
The seven principles are set out in The Kybalion, published in Chicago in 1908 under the name “Three Initiates”. Its author is widely believed to be William Walker Atkinson, a prolific writer of the American New Thought movement.
The book presents its teaching as the lost wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus, a legendary Egyptian sage. The real Hermetic writings, the Corpus Hermeticum, are Greek texts from Roman Egypt, written around the 1st to 3rd centuries CE. Renaissance Europe believed them far older until the scholar Isaac Casaubon dated them in 1614. Historians note that The Kybalion’s ideas owe more to New Thought than to those ancient texts.
The seven principles, in brief
Each is a philosophical idea, not a scientific law. In plain words:
| Principle | The idea |
|---|---|
| Mentalism | Reality is, at root, mind: everything begins as thought. |
| Correspondence | “As above, so below”: patterns repeat at every scale. |
| Vibration | Nothing is at rest; everything moves and vibrates. |
| Polarity | Opposites are two ends of one thing, differing in degree. |
| Rhythm | Everything flows out and back, like a tide or a pendulum. |
| Cause and effect | Nothing happens by chance; every effect has a cause. |
| Gender | Everything holds complementary active and receptive sides. |
“As above, so below”
The most quoted line is older than The Kybalion. It paraphrases the Emerald Tablet, a short text known from Arabic sources of roughly the 8th to 10th centuries and translated into Latin in the 12th, which became a founding text of European alchemy.
Twelve laws: a modern extension
Some contemporary writers build on the seven. Robert Edward Grant’s Harmonic Codex, presented on the Polymath site, describes twelve laws, adding Balance, Unity, Reflection, Return and a “Universal Gateway”, and pairs each with a musical interval and an energy centre. It is his own system, offered as philosophy; we describe it here and do not reproduce or endorse it. The same site also shares 24 personal precepts on themes such as self-responsibility, non-judgement, gratitude and kindness.
A real thread: the quadrivium
One idea these traditions share is historically solid. For about a thousand years, European education taught the quadrivium: arithmetic (number itself), geometry (number in space), music (number in time) and astronomy (number in space and time). The Roman scholar Boethius gave it that name around 500 CE. With the trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric it formed the seven liberal arts.
Where CUE stands
CUE does not treat the Hermetic principles as rules of its system, and nothing in a CUE reading depends on them. They are here because many people meet them alongside numerology and astrology, and deserve an accurate account of what they are and where they came from.